That turned out to be impossible.” That’s certainly true, and it’s also interesting, when listening to the event itself, to note the way its very structure and atmosphere, rather than nurturing real conversation, dumbed it down in, well, exactly the way Desh said it did in his analogy to terrible YouTube comments. He had imagined that a large appreciative audience would gather to hear two feminist writer-professors with very different ideas discuss their differences - and perhaps find some common ground. “He had a great success bringing the physicist Michio Kaku to Australia. “He reminded me of the Dev Patel character in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - charming, enthusiastic, idealistic but a bit overwhelmed by events,” said Sommers. One point of consensus among all the participants in this fracas seems to be that Desh was a bit blindsided by the intensity of what the mini-tour had wrought, both in its run-up and during the events themselves. “People had already picked their sides when they came into it, we could hardly get words in, and people were chanting and yelling and screaming.”” Singal traces the ways that the various participants simply could not engage in an adult conversation without devolving into chants, boastings, and insults that mimicked a YouTube comments section. “Imagine a terrible, terrible YouTube comments section - but live,” he says. As Desh tells it, “the crowd was largely responsible. Gay and Sommers have very different approaches to feminism when Gay was asked before the event about why she would share the stage with Sommers “Gay called Sommers a “white supremacist,” a claim for which there doesn’t appear to be any evidence (Sommers is Jewish and says she is a registered Democrat, for what it’s worth).” The event itself, and its aftermath on social media, proved how difficult it is to have a meaningful conversation in public about difficult questions.
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Last year, Desh decided to invite two feminists Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers.